In an ideal world my friends would be perfectly honest and objective about my work. In this land, taste for my writing (or absence of such) would be perfectly orthogonal to qualities I’d look for in a friend. That is to say, I’d see no benefit of keeping people as friends depending on whether they share affinity towards my writing.

Yet we live in the real world filled with suspicious coincidences. Such that all of my friends like essays written by the same author. Some of them don’t even read essays written by any other author.

Well, this is mainly the case, because other essays are not force-fed to them in a vegan author’s attempt at creating a neural foie gras. However, if you’re one of the lucky friends, your brains will be every neural surgical recovery professional’s wet dream. A case study of lobotomy achieved through words alone. Anyway, I shouldn’t make the lobotomy more painful through needless asides.

In our flawed world, friends who like friend’s essays are aplenty. However, friends who are honest in their distaste, or even apathy, those are rare. If VCs were fortunate enough to have such friends, general partners would stop shoving bookbound garbage down the founders’ throats. Those friends are a sobering dose of reality in the days when one gets carried away. Some days all that a friend needs is a nudge along the lines of: “you were a legend last night bruv, but invading Ukraine is a bad idea”.